Re: [FT] Yet Another Fighters Suggestion

>On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 agoodall@att.net wrote:

>We're probably going to run thru the entire fighters debate, yet again,
so
>here's my contribution: fighters are too cheap. The cost should go up
by
>1.5x or 2x per group. You're paying for a weapon system that is
>invulnerable until *it* decides to attack something, which is something
no
>other ship or system in FT has.

 I think, and from the archives most would agree, that
 fighters are priced about right when you don't have
 more than a dozen flights or so, corresponding to
 battles up to 3,000 pts or so apiece.

 The problem is that they scale in a non-linear fashion.
 If you have ten times as many points of beam weapons,
 you are roughly ten times more effective. (There are
 some non-linear effects, such as more chance of double
 or worse threshhold failure.) If you have ten times as
 many fighters in a "stack of doom" then it's far more
 than ten times as effective.

 Increasing the cost of fighters will move the point at
 which they become too deadly up, but it will also make
 them too expensive in smaller battles.

	Cheers,
	Hugh